Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1535954
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2025 If you say, "I like my quotes formatted like this instead of that," it's okay, but is that bet- ter? Is it cleaner and more easily understood? Do your customers care, or are you reinventing the wheel for no reason? When quoting, is that format truly your strategic differentiator? Like you said, quoting software used to be a differentiator; now it is a cost of doing busi- ness. To be truly competitive, what's the expected ROI for the change to the KPIs? Quoting isn't the first step in the process. ere's a step above that in the funnel: generating leads, getting RFQs in the first place. Having a better quoting process can, in the long run, help you get more RFQs when customers start to see improved satisfaction. But you have to address the lead generation part of the funnel, too. e ROI calculation, in my opinion, comes from looking at the many steps in the funnel over- all, not just the quoting step. KPI improvement goes back to responsiveness to customers and accuracy. What's the consistency of your mar- gins on these quotes aer you build and ship them (the accuracy)? Now you can bid on more opportunities at a higher close rate. at's your ROI; you can pursue sales that you otherwise would not have spent your time on. An example of that is a customer that comes to you with 20 quotes every month, but only gives you occasional business. When it's expen- sive and tedious to do a quote, you stop pursu- ing those opportunities, or you just do a rough quote instead. But now you can afford to do a more detailed quote because you've become more effi- cient, and if one of those turns into a hundred-thousand-dollar PO? Well, your ROI is a hundred thou- sand dollars in revenue that you didn't have before. Right. Out of those 20 opportuni- ties, if you just pick up one more, and increase your close rate, then you've added to the ROI. Yes, exactly. Part of that calculation should also be your win rate. I've seen both extremes. I've seen companies that do 500 quotes a month in their $20 million business, and I've seen com- panies do five quotes a month for their $20 million business. e win rate definitely mat- ters in there. Winning 100% is probably too high because you're underbidding yourself, and winning 2% is probably too low because you haven't narrowed down on your ideal cus- tomer profile. I would expect that EMS providers will get bet- ter metrics from specialized quoting software than out of homegrown Excel spreadsheets. I would think so. At CalcuQuote, we had dash- boards for it. Because the data is structured in a database, you can turn it into all kinds of insights. One of the interesting things, I always thought, was tracking your win rate as a corre- lation of other things. So, for example, what's my win rate by salesperson? What's my win rate by range of quantity? What's my win rate by industry segment? What's my win rate by gross margin range? at's some insightful information. If I were running an EMS com- pany, I'd want to know where I win the most business because I would start prioritizing my work wherever that sweet spot is. Chintan, you have given us a lot of valuable insights. Thank you. Happy to help, Nolan. SMT007